Æstival Tide w-2 Read online

  “There is a breach in the fundus of Angels,” the Architects replied at last. “The rift at Pier Forty-three is spreading.”

  “Thank you. Indoctrinate Pier Forty-four.”

  Hobi glanced sideways at his father. In profile Sajur Panggang resembled his dead wife, the same fine features and sharp nose. They had been first cousins. Like nearly everyone else on the upper levels of Araboth, they were distant relatives of the Orsinate.

  “A breach?” Hobi asked, a little uneasily. “What’s that mean?”

  Sajur Panggang started, looked at his son as though noticing him for the first time. He shook his head. “Nothing. Routine maintenance. Aren’t you up a little early?”

  Considering how late you were out last night, Hobi thought. He grinned and shrugged. His father frowned and flicked at one corner of the screen. The monitor went blank. Sajur leaned back in his chair, the long ornamented sleeves of his kimono brushing the floor. “Would you please ask Khum to bring some more kehveh? Or no—I’ll go with you.”

  The Architect Imperator stood and stretched. The brocaded sleeves slid from thin wrists to show the emerald mourning bands he still wore. Hobi noticed how his father’s hand shook as he picked up his porcelain cup, and how Sajur looked back at the empty screen, the banks of ancient monitors like the walls of a tomb. On one of them the image of the Undercity still lingered, its web of ruined roadways and empty channels glowing faintly. The Architect Imperator stared at it for a long moment while his son waited, puzzled. Then he carefully closed the door and turned down the hall.

  Behind them in the empty chamber the other screens slowly started to glow, blue and gold and violet. The Architects began to click and whisper, doing their master’s work.

  Chapter 2

  THE GREEN COUNTRY

  IN A RICKSHAW ON Thrones Level, Ceryl Waxwing watched a moujik girl die. The child’s arms had been pinned to the seat, the skin folded back and neatly pierced with slender spikes as long as Ceryl’s finger. As the girl moaned the exposed veins and muscles quivered like taut yarn, and blood seeped onto the seat’s verdigris leather. For nearly an hour now Ceryl had stared expectantly at her face, waiting for the look ziz Orsina had told her would come—“When the timoring is successful and they know they’re dying,” the margravine had said. Every word she uttered always sounded as though she were somehow managing to suck it from the air. Ceryl hated her voice, her face (the same blade of a face she shared with her sisters Nike and Shiyung and their exiled brother Nasrani, the same face that appeared on the devalued currency that Ceryl had used to buy the moujik), the way she smelled, of cunt and sweat and opium sugar—but Ceryl was too close to them now, the Orsinate, to afford such simple prejudices. “They get this look when they know, children especially…”

  That was why Ceryl had bought the moujik girl on Principalities Level, knowing she stood a good chance of having her throat slashed while she was there. As it was three moujiks had surrounded the rickshaw, gibbering at the rickshaw driver and spitting at her as she clambered back in, the sedated girl in her arms. It was nearly two hundred years since the particular conflict with the Balkhash Commonwealth that had brought the moujiks here, peasants who were ostensibly prisoners of war but really slaves put to work in the medifacs, the great abattoirs on Principalities. Nothing went to waste in Araboth: the bodies of the dead were processed as efficiently as the vegetable and animal proteins manufactured in the vivariums on Dominations. Only members of the Orsinate and their cabinet received the honor of a funeral pyre. And so the moujik peasants proved an ideal resource, a ready labor breeding pool that did not deplete the Orsinate’s own population.

  Despite their centuries of servitude, the moujiks had never lost their belligerence, or their distinctive appearance. Tawny skin, flat face, round eyes the color of honey. Not as fair as Ceryl was, with her close-cropped sandy hair and blue eyes. But certainly darker than the Orsinate, although the Orsinas’ long alliance with the religious fanatics from the East had left its own imprint—one could tell an Orsina bastard by its doe eyes, just a little too close-set, and its dusky skin.

  No one would ever mistake a moujik for one of the ruling caste. They lacked the Orsinate’s cunning and sophistication, and even the most rudimentary reading skills. But enough belligerence remained in the moujiks to impel them toward the body riots of the Third Ascension, when they had seized Principalities Level and murdered three Ascendant Governors who happened to be touring the medifacs. Since then, the Orsinate maintained an uneasy truce with the medifacs. Among other things, they allowed the moujiks control of the city’s black market body trade, for those on the lower levels who could not afford prosthetics. This same truce allowed for a brisk barter in moujik children for timoring, children not as highly prized as those from the upper levels, Thrones or Dominations say.

  It had been Ceryl’s first solo attempt at timoring, her first trip down to the medifacs. She had felt more terror taking the gravator to Principalities than at gazing upon the moujik child’s contorted face. She turned to stare down at her again, then hastily looked away and groped at her pockets until she found a candicaine pipette. She broke it and inhaled, let the cold rush calm her. There had been no sublime wave of fear as she stared at the pathetic thing beside her. Oh, the child had struggled and screamed enough before the morpha set, there was no doubt that she was afraid. But Ceryl herself felt only disgust, and shame: the child looked so small and white against the dark leather. Blood had pooled on the seat beside her, staining Ceryl’s catsuit. She leaned over to touch one of the pinions of flesh gleaming slightly in the purplish light. The rickshaw driver had pulled down the plastic shades before they went down to the medifacs. Now the smell of blood and meat filled the inside of the tiny wooden car. Suddenly she felt sick.

  “Stop—” she gasped. The rickshaw shuddered to a halt. The driver turned to stare at her blankly, spat a wad of betel juice onto the pavement. “Just wait,” Ceryl choked, and opened the door.

  Violet light spilled onto her, the perpetual dusk of the upper levels. She smelled the warm mist heavy with the scent of the sea Outside. Despite the thousands of filters humming and doing their best to dispel it, the smell and damp of the sea still got in. Lately it seemed inescapable. Those members of the pleasure cabinet who were more superstitious than Ceryl shook their heads and whispered about bad omens—strands of kelp found floating in filtration chambers, the odd bit of mussel shell clogging a drain. Certainly Ceryl had noticed the smell more lately, but she attributed that to the fact that Æstival Tide was less than a week away.

  Now it was that smell that made her feel better. She breathed deeply, eyes closed. A vague impression of warmth and green flooded her, a memory of the sound of birds. She had seen the ocean, of course, ten years earlier at the last Æstival Tide, when they finally opened the Lahatiel Gate. The sight of that restless sea had terrified her, the closest she ever came to the holy terror of timoring. Ever since then she had wondered whether you would always feel like that, if you lived near it. Really lived near it—on real sand and smelling real air and tasting brackish water—and not within this unimaginably vast and intricate labyrinth of a city, dying beneath its domes between the blasted prairie and the threatening sea. Maybe, if she lived by the sea, she would not be plagued by nightmares and forced to spend much of her monthly salary on pantomancers, those quack dream-merchants.

  Her cheeks grew cool with mist and she sighed, opening her eyes. The rickshaw had stopped at the outermost rim of the Thrones Level Grid. The avenue here was in blessedly good repair, the surface beneath her feet smooth and cool. Only, behind one of the rickshaw’s wheels, she noticed a crack in the pavement, like a thread of water running down the avenue.

  “That’s odd,” she said aloud. The rickshaw driver cocked his head at her and shrugged.

  “Something new,” he said, spitting a crimson mouthful of betel juice onto the ground. “Cracks. I had to repair a wheel bearing twice in three days.”

  “Cracks,�
� Ceryl repeated softly, and stared down at the ground.

  Behind her were the broken spires and crooked facades of Thrones’ residential neighborhoods. Like everything else on the upper levels of Araboth, these apartments were prefabricated by the Architects. Over the last few centuries the metal and plasteel structures had cracked and buckled under the weight of the levels above, until all of Thrones seemed to be caving in upon itself, albeit in a subdued, almost genteel manner. Although of course living quarters here were a vast improvement over the dayglo ghettos of Virtues, where the hermaphrodites lived, or the grim cubicles that housed the ’filers and media crews on Powers. At least on Thrones the roads had always been in good repair.

  Ceryl sighed and rubbed her nose. A few yards in front of her, a shimmering heat fence crackled and sparked as moisture filtered down from the Quincunx Domes. Beyond the fence was nothing, a dizzying plunge to the next level, Dominations, and thence to Virtues, and Powers, and so on down to the lowest level of the crazily layered ziggurat that was Araboth. If one could see the city from above (but of course you could not, unless you were an Aviator), it would resemble a huge and living pagoda, its vaulted domes rearing above the nine levels like the chitinous shell of some monstrous arthropod. And Outside, the sea: smashing against the domes during the months-long storm season, whispering through the dreams of the Imperators’ children as they slept in their gilded beds on Cherubim.

  It was only the Architects that protected them from the horrors of the sea and the world Outside. There, an earth seeded by centuries of radiation and viral rains had given birth to heteroclites and demons. Only the tireless Architects protected them from that. On the uppermost levels, Seraphim and Cherubim, the Ascendants’ robotic engineers constantly built and rebuilt Araboth’s pinnacles and spires and moats. You might wake one morning and find that the outside of your chambers had been gilded. Or there might be a new place of worship where last night there had been nothing: a shining new crucifix-speared mosque, wherein the Orsinate propitiated the horrors of the ravening world with offerings of prisoners taken in ceaseless raids against the Commonwealth.

  Or, if you were unfortunate enough to live on the lower levels, you might find that in a single night the Architects had destroyed your ghetto on Powers. Or they might have torched a refinery on Archangels, immolating thousands of rasas as the Architects’ grinding machines leveled factories and apartment buildings made of polymer-strengthened paper. The next day perhaps an ice-blue lake would be there, with Orsinate bastards skimming across its surface in their azure gas-fired proas, while from its banks their replicant nursemaids stood guard with blank yet watchful eyes.

  Or there might be nothing there at all, a smoking ruin such as Ceryl’s dead lover Giton Arrowsmith had found once, where his chambers had been. That was before Ceryl’s promotion to the pleasure cabinet. She had never thought she would look back with any fondness upon Giton’s fishy-smelling cubicle on Dominations; but here she was, tearfully nostalgic in front of a heat fence on Thrones. There was no reason for it, for any of it. There was absolutely no reasoning behind the Architects’ ceaseless construction and deconstruction of the city. Even the margravine ziz admitted to that, and Sajur Panggang, the Architect Imperator who was supposed to monitor the great machines.

  “We grew lazy and forgot how to program them,” he had told Ceryl once, and shrugged. “So now they program themselves. I, um, occasionally make suggestions to them, and if I’m fortunate, well, they listen to me.”

  He was a small slender man, the Architect Imperator, with the large gentle eyes and strong chin of his Orsina cousins. Unlike his cousins, Sajur was gifted with a keen, if narrowly focused, intelligence. The Architects had designed most of the buildings in Araboth—for example, those dizzying residences on Cherubim that assumed such bizarrely baroque proportions that they could scarcely be looked at by a sane person, let alone lived in. But Sajur Panggang had created the Reception Areas, the labyrinthine prisons that supplied the vivariums on Dominations with food. And he had also designed many of Araboth’s hundreds of kerchief-sized parks, where the marvel of holographic landscaping made it seem that one gazed across a moor swept with lavender sage in bloom, or peered up at the unimaginably distant bulk of mountains with peaks so sharp they might have been cut from paper—which, in essence, they were.

  “The Orsinas have never been known for their intellect,” Sajur had confessed to Ceryl. This was not long after his wife’s murder. Ceryl, recalling her own grief after Giton’s death, had expressed her sympathy for Sajur’s bereavement. “It’s a miracle it’s all still standing, really.”

  He had cast an ironic glance at the ceiling, and stroked the elegant cobalt cylinder of a drafting mannequin. “A wonderful, wonderful miracle.” Ceryl recalled him enviously. She wished she could consider anything inside of Araboth a miracle. Because as she stared out at the heat fence sparking a few feet in front of her, the pale violet light that made everything look like its own shadow, Ceryl felt only despair.

  Behind her the moujik girl gasped. Ceryl’s knee bumped the open door as she turned and with one hand brushed a tendril of greasy hair from the child’s forehead. As she watched a film covered the girl’s wide eyes, like gray silk. Then she was still. Ceryl continued to stare at her, aware that she was experiencing nothing but a faint and rising nausea, the same feeling she had if she lingered too long at one of the promenades on Cherubim, looking down upon the dwindling lights of Araboth’s lower levels.

  So, she thought, and grinned miserably. She really was incapable of the higher emotions. Not even Giton’s execution, not even this child dying in her lap, could move her. Only to the morphodites, the dream-mantics, could she confess what truly sickened her and haunted her dreams: the city itself beneath its shell of eternal twilight, breathing softly all around her, while its unseen Architects chattered and hummed and ordered the endless renovation of their animate hive.

  She let her breath out in a long gasp and slid to the edge of the seat. A gust of hot air shot up from beyond the heat fence, heavy with the doughy smell of fermentation from one of the vivariums below. Ceryl lifted her head. She looked out over the abyss and saw a fouga, a dirigible warship, moving slowly and with a resonant wasplike hum toward the skygate in the highest of the Quincunx Domes. Behind it trailed a yolk-yellow banner, a pennon signaling an Ascendant triumph.

  Ceryl sighed. The fouga would be returning from a skirmish with the Balkhash Commonwealth. She had seen last night’s broadcast, showing scenes of neurological warfare played out against the calm blue reach of an island in the Archipelago. The sight of men and women writhing and howling on the beach had finally proven too much for her, and she’d switched the screen off. No one really believed in the ’files, of course. Ceryl herself had once watched an ostensibly live broadcast of a desert battle being produced in a studio on Powers Level. A number of moujiks and even a few uniformed rasas stood in for the Commonwealth soldiers and Ascendant janissaries. Ceryl was only mildly shocked to learn that the blood, at least, was real.

  The wars were real, too. Hundreds of wars, even thousands of them. Over the last four centuries the world had shattered into a thousand parts, each with its own petty tyrant fighting its neighbors for dwindling resources. The Shining that brought about the First Ascension all but destroyed the subtle network that held the world together. The next holocaust obliterated the faltering remnants of any telecommunications systems. That Shining was followed by others, too many to count. Those who survived the nuclear holocausts fell victim to mutagenic rains that desolated most of this continent and its southern antipode. Of the rest of the world, only the Archipelago and parts of the subcontinent, and Wyalong, the great Austral island, were relatively untouched by the viral wars. The Balkhash Commonwealth held sway over the detritus of Eurasia; the Håbilis Emirate controlled the Glass Continent and the Desert Lands. The vast mutated jungles and radiation deserts of the Americas had become the object of more wars than anyone could count. For two hundred yea
rs now they had for the most part been controlled by the NASNA Ascendancy—although that word “control” scarcely applied. There were huge areas of the continents where no Ascendants had ever stepped, where those who had survived the holocausts and viral wars had reverted to forms of barbarism surpassing even the excesses of their ancestors.

  A few pockets of technological sophistication remained. Araboth was one of them. Ceryl could not have pointed out any of the others on a map. She knew that the centuries-long wars with the Balkhash Commonwealth and the Håbilis Emirates continued, but she could not have told you why. Something to do with water, maybe, or the hydrofarms still active in the western ocean.

  Probably the Orsinate themselves did not really know. In the tangled web of diplomatic intrigue and barbarism that now constituted the civilized world, even the Orsinate took their commands from a higher source. The true Ascendants, the supreme military aristocracy who after the First Ascension had rebelled against their commanders and forsaken the ravaged earth for the network of HORUS stations circling the planet. Since then the Ascendant Autocracy lived in the HORUS stations, where they cosseted their ancient computers and failing stores of military hardware. Only the NASNA Aviators traveled between HORUS and the rest of the world, seeding the great prairies with viral rains, poisoning the hydrofarms of the Håbilis Emirate with metrophages and burning gases.

  And now here was an Aviator fouga returning to Araboth from some unknown mission. Maybe last night’s broadcast had been real, after all. There might be more prisoners from the Emirate, captured to slave in the refineries of Archangels Level. Or the fouga might carry no one but the Aviators, returning for one of their periodic shows of triumph: a twitch of the long chain that stretched from Araboth to the heavens.